Amorphous carbon films have been used in semiconductor processing to provide hardmasks to transfer feature patterns to a substrate for etch processes. Such carbon films are typically deposited using spin coating or PECVD coating.
Recently, amorphous carbon has been used to provide gap fill for gap features during semiconductor processing operations. Such carbon gap-fill films may be used, for example, as a sacrificial layer in logic/memory semiconductor device fabrication.
Such gap fill may be provided using spin coating techniques or by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) techniques such as those used to provide hardmasks. Spin-on coating techniques, however, can provide poor mechanical properties that yield bad chemical-mechanical planarization results and prevent or hinder process integration. In contrast, PECVD deposited carbon films normally have good overall film properties, but large voids are typically formed in trench-like gap features due to poor gap-fill capability.